Saturday at DeSmogBlog, Laura Peterson reported in North Dakota’s Carbon Capture Project Tundra Another “Expensive Greenwashing” Attempt to Bail Out Coal Power:
Carbon capture technology has generated a lot of controversy–but little private investment–due to its lack of profitability and efficiency. So why is a proposal to retrofit an aging coal-powered plant in North Dakota with smokestack scrubbers receiving millions of federal taxpayer dollars?
Ask Senator John Hoeven (R-ND), who has directed more than $30 million in Department of Energy funding to Project Tundra.
The project would install a carbon capture system at the Milton R. Young Station, a two-unit plant that has run on lignite coal from the nearby Center Mine since it began operating in 1970. The captured carbon would then be piped to the Bakken region for injection into oil wells in a process known as Enhanced Oil Recovery.
Hoeven recently secured a $10 million DOE grant that will go toward a preliminary engineering study for Project Tundra. State and coal industry sources have also contributed, with the aim of keeping the coal industry alive in North Dakota. Other help will come from tax incentives for carbon capture projects that Congress passed in 2018.
Project Tundra already enjoys tax benefits at the state level. A bill eliminating taxes for oil extracted by carbon dioxide derived from lignite coal combustion was passed into law last year.
Yet all that money may be for naught, given the track record of similar projects.
Project Tundra was pushed by the Lignite Energy Council, which Hoeven is close to — the Council donated $21,000 to his reelection campaigns since he first ran for the Senate in 2010.
That may not sound like much these days, but he's one of their top recipients, and he has spoken at their annual meetings.
Open Secrets notes that Minnesota Eighth District congressman Pete Stauber (R) received $1000 from the fund in the 2019-2020 cycle, while DFLers Rick Nolan, MN08, and Collin Peterson, MN07 pocketed $1000 in the 2013-2014 cycle, while only $500 rolled into Sixth District Republican Tom Emmer's bank account that year.
Bluestem reported in late February that Lignite Energy Council had set up a MN political fund so we'll be looking for state level giving once reports start coming in the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board.
This month, we also looked at Carbon capture in the news & an early March forum.
Other partners in the project include the Minnkota Power Cooperative, which operates the plant; the University of North Dakota's Energy and Environmental Research Center, originally founded as a lignite research laboratory under the U.S. Bureau of Mines; and the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which authorized a $15 million grant from its Lignite Research Fund. Minnkota external affairs manager Stacy Dahl estimated the total cost of the project at $1.3 and $1.6 billion.
Press materials on the project say it will replicate successful carbon capture projects such as Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, Canada and the Petra Nova plant in Texas. But neither of these projects are great models. Petra Nova is run on a different type of coal that reacts better with the solvent used to capture gas. The Boundary Dam Station installed carbon capture technology on one of its six units with the intent of expanding, but abandoned the effort in 2017 because the costs outweighed the benefits.
We posted about Project Tundra last year in Project Tundra's clean coal; or, does Petra Nova project's tech really reduce carbon emissions?.
Peterson continues:
Project Tundra's boosters are frank about the project's intent: To maintain coal's primary role in North Dakota's energy mix. “It really is about finding a path forward for coal in a carbon-managed world,” Dahl told the Bismarck Tribune. Neither Minnkota nor Hoeven responded to DeSmog’s requests for comment.
But the technologies taxpayer dollars are funding aren’t managing carbon produced from coal any better than renewable sources of energy, experts say. Michael Barnard, Chief Strategist of the energy consultancy TFIE, has written several analyses of the economics behind carbon capture and monetization. The studies all conclude that carbon capture–particularly involving Enhanced Oil Recovery–amounts to what he calls “expensive greenwashing.”
“It’s a very expensive band-aid for local economies dependent on fossil fuels,” Barnard told DeSmog. He cites studies showing that it takes a ton of carbon to extract anywhere from ¼ to 1 ton of oil from wells, so that when the carbon produced by the process is factored in, it’s “a carbon multiplier.”
This is the same message as a report produced last year by Mark Z. Jacobsen of Stanford University, which concluded that carbon capture cannot compete with renewables in terms of carbon removal. . . .
There's more in North Dakota’s Carbon Capture Project Tundra Another “Expensive Greenwashing” Attempt to Bail Out Coal Power. Read the entire post.
Since CCS in North Dakota is tied to the state's oil and gas industry--Peterson reports "captured carbon would then be piped to the Bakken region for injection into oil wells in a process known as Enhanced Oil Recovery"--we also recommend Amy Sisk's latest article at the Bismarck Tribune, North Dakota braces for a bleak oil future: layoffs, idled wells, falling tax revenue. Sisk reports:
When North Dakota’s top oil regulator spoke about the oil price collapse during his monthly update last week, he called it a “black swan event.”
The term does not refer to the Swan Lake ballet; rather, it’s used to describe something rare and unexpected with major consequences.
For the oil industry, this black swan event is anticipated to result in problems like bankruptcies, particularly for smaller companies that operate lower-producing wells, North Dakota Mineral Resources Director Lynn Helms said.
“We saw that with the last price collapse and we fully anticipate that we will see that now,” Helms said, referring to the 2015 downturn when oil prices plummeted over the course of the year.
Drilling in the Bakken slowed then and layoffs occurred as well. There are already signs of both today as oil has plummeted into the $20- to $30-per-barrel range.
The number of rigs drilling for oil in North Dakota dropped by at least five over the course of the past week to 51 on Friday, according to figures from the state Oil and Gas Division. Helms said it’s possible low prices could cut the state’s rig count in half within the next three months.
. . .Another sign of what the state will have to deal with came last week when the Oil and Gas Division tallied up the number of inactive wells for January: 2,607. Companies had idled nearly 700 wells since the previous month, a 36% increase in North Dakota’s inactive well total.
Winter weather accounts for part of the jump, as it always prompts companies to shut in some wells, but this climb was significant. Oil prices started to fall in January as the demand for crude dropped in China, where the virus outbreak began late last year. Then they collapsed dramatically earlier in March as the alliance between Russia and OPEC to hold back production broke up, prompting a price war.
. . .Helms anticipates more wells will idle as oil profits decline. The wells companies choose to stop operating tend to be older and produce less oil.
How will these faltering fortunes in the Bakken (the end customers for all that captured coal carbon) impact the expensive green-washing at Project Tundra? Say tuned.
Related posts
- Will ethanol industry go the way of oil? It's going to be ugly, Al-Corn Clean Fuel CEO Doyal says
- Bismarck Tribune: North Dakota oil industry gets roughed up by brutally low petroleum prices
Photo: Minnkota's Milton R Young power plant.
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